Science and technology

Human-powered flight

The birdmen

THE Royal Aeronautical Society is a stately British institution, but one with a soft spot for amateur inventors and fiddlers. Since 1959 it has offered a series of awards, known as the Kremer Prizes, to encourage endeavours in human-powered flight. The first prize was won by Gossamer Condor in 1977 as the first human-powered aircraft (known in the aeronautical world as an HPA) to demonstrate controlled and sustained flight. Paul MacCready, an American aeronautical engineer who designed the aircraft, then went on to build the Gossamer Albratros, which in 1979 won a second Kremer prize for flying from England to France. At a recent conference on HPAs at the Society it was pleasing to learn there are more Kramer prizes to win and that the birdmen are as industrious as ever.

One of them, David Barford, builds racing-car engines at Cosworth as his day job and during his spare time is assembling a pedal-powered aircraft called Betterfly. Using home-made carbon fibre tubing and whatever else he can lay his hands on, his construction is meticulous and structurally high tech. In the best tradition, bits of the aircraft are stored in his garage and around the house. Mr Barford is not out to win a Kremer prize, one of which is available to schools, but will be content enough just to lift off the ground in a machine he has built himself for the princely sum of £2,000 ($3,130).

Bill Brooks, technical director of P&M aviation, which makes microlights, has long been modifying hang gliders to use small engines. A basic HPA is, says Dr Brooks, really only able to fly at low altitude in calm weather conditions. But there are versions of the craft, which he calls soaring human-powered aircraft (SHPA), which can provide more endurance and performance. One such is a hang glider which, when launched from the side of a hill, can be used to ride thermal currents and achieve some altitude. Then, with a set of pedals linked to a small prop at the rear, he can pedal it along to another thermal. Dr Brooks would like SHPAs to be recognised as a new category of aircraft, along with its own challenges and prizes.

I suppose the most fun I've had in recent years was finding a scarce pre-WWII taildragger I'd read about, but never expected to see, let alone own (a Porterfield; never heard of it, right ?) and learning to fly in it; but I'm still jealous of the birds. I watch them now with an understanding I never had before, and I am in awe at what they can do. In a glider, you watch for them, and then you climb with them in the rising air they led you to. I want wings like theirs.

Hello, good people. As a lifelong pilot of all things from hang gliders to wildfire bombers, what I would like to see available in my remaining years to fly, would be an aircraft with an energy storage system like (maybe initially) a large rubber band motor that could be wound up either by the pilot cranking his arms and/or legs or by the propeller, if one were soaring in ridge lift or high enough to transfer potential energy of altitude into one's rubber motor energy storage system, for use whenever you would care to extend your glide. For us old lazy pilots, we could wind up the rubber band with a motor on the ground ahead of our takeoff. This would allow us to soar the flatlands as well as the hills. Hooray for being alive when this stuff can transpire.